


In The Service Of Life

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [22]
Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: 30Fic, Asexuality, Conception, F/M, Future Fic, Grey-A, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 04:10:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2095221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nita is well over the line into the territory of things they don't really do any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Service Of Life

**Author's Note:**

> Content note at the end.
> 
> This future can be considered an AU after High Wizardry - there's no particular specific divergence, I just know and love the early books much more than the recent ones, so I tend to ignore their canon.

Kit is elbows-deep in a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle when Nita gets home. He's having a serious conversation with the rocker arm - is it just experimenting with higher friction, or is this a permanent new commitment? - and isn't really paying attention to anything beyond the rim of the engine bay, so he doesn't realize she's there until she presses up against him from behind.

"Hi again," she says in his ear, hooking her chin over his shoulder, "Want me to leave you to it?"

"Nah," he says, "Sorry I didn't hear you. I think I'm done here for now."

"Good," she says, purring almost, and her hands are sliding up his belly, up over his ribs, and her lips are nuzzling his neck.

Kit is surprised. Hugging from behind is standard (it's a running joke that they both go wash dishes when they want to be petted, because the other one is so likely to come over) but usually... affectionate. Cozy. Nita, rubbing his chest through his shirt and wiggling her pelvis against his butt, is well over the line into the territory of things they don't really do any more, and Kit doesn't _object_ , he just wants to make sure he's on the right page, here.

Nita's right hand is starting to wander south and, okay, that's definitely a good time for a check-in. Kit pins her arms under his, against his sides, and asks, "Nita? Everything okay?"

"Mmm," she answers, rubbing her face against his neck, "I just - I really like you, Kit."

Well. He really likes her too, so, okay; he releases her arms, and turns around partway so he can look at her. "I'm all greasy, though," he warns her, and it's true: he's holding his hands carefully away from her, but they're pretty much black with engine grime. If he touches her he's going to leave handprints.

Nita rolls her eyes but kisses him briefly on the lips. "Fine, go wash up," she tells him, so he does that. He scrubs carefully around and under his fingernails, and checks for sharp corners - he has no idea what Nita has in mind but it seems like a good idea to be prepared. After a moment's hesitation, he strips off his dirty T-shirt and drops it in the laundry hamper, and goes shirtless out to the living room, where Nita is waiting on the couch. She grins at him appreciatively and he sits down next to her and kisses her.

This, at least, they do a fair bit, although it's usually an end in itself, and it feels different with Nita telegraphing that all this is going somewhere. She's got her hands back on his bare chest, finger tracing around one nipple, and his body is starting to notice that it's being touched in stimulating places; his body is starting to have thoughts about that.

Nita breaks away from the kiss and shucks off her shirt and bra. Kit's always done pretty well doing to her whatever she just did to him, so he does that, watching her nipple pebble up, which is fun.

"Kit," Nita says, and tackles him backwards onto the couch, until he's on his back, head twisted awkwardly against the arm, and she's stretched out on top of him. He loves that, all that skin touching skin, and it would be even better without two pairs of jeans in the middle. He works his hands in between their bodies and starts groping around for buttons and zippers.

Squirming around trying to get everyone's pants off is fun, but ineffective, and Nita eventually snorts and climbs off and drops trou in a more sensible fashion. Kit gets his down past his hips (taking advantage of the interruption to scoot down a little, so he can straighten his head) and bats his eyes imploringly at Nita until she pulls them the rest of the way off.

Technically, the last time they were naked together was that morning, with Kit in the shower and Nita brushing her teeth, but this feels different, the shivery anticipation of sex. "Why today," he wants to ask, maybe even "did something happen at work?" but he remembers from before that if they start talking, they'll probably keep talking and lose track of their bodies until Kit starts, like, tracing patterns on Nita's thigh, or something, and recalls that she had stripped for a reason, and Nita realize she's hungry, and Kit will want to look something up she was talking about, and so much for the sex plan. Whatever precipitated this, Kit doesn't want to derail it, not when Nita's all pink and dark-eyed and enthused, so he stays quiet, just puts a hand out to her hip, welcoming.

She slings a leg over him and sits down on his lap. Kit is disappointed she's not lying down, flush on top of him like a big warm Nita blanket, but he likes her hands on his belly, and his dick likes the slick of her labia as she rocks on top of him.

He's all the way hard now, and she kneels up a little, reaching down with her hand to guide him up into - 

"Whoa," Kit says, lifting his head and putting his hands on her thighs, holding her still. "Um, Neets, condom? If we're going to do that?"

Nita, above him, blinks. Her eyes unfocus for a moment, like she's trying to remember something, and then she looks back at him and shakes her head a little. "Right," she says, "Sorry, I... don't know what I was thinking there. Um... I don't know if we have anything. Maybe in the bathroom?"

Kit would have voted for "do something else", but Nita is the kind of person who, once she thinks of something she wants to find, cannot stop herself from looking for it, even if she's just rechecking the same two places it still isn't. A condom, if they still have one, could be lurking any number of places - medicine cabinet? Nightstand? Go bag? Kit eventually finds one at the back of his underwear drawer, but on further inspection it turns out to have expired years ago, and they shake their heads at each other in perfect agreement about that.

His erection has inexplicably managed to persist through all this, bobbing along from bathroom to bedroom in the most useless possible way. Nita gives it a friendly little squeeze, and says, "I could still, uh, help with this? If you want?" 

Kit thinks about it, but, "Nah," he says. "I'll take care of it, you start dinner?"

" _Yes_ ," says Nita, "I got some mizuna and radishes at the farmer's market, I was thinking maybe salads and some of those tuna burgers in the freezer?"

***

Kit means to discuss it further with Nita, but gets sidetracked. Buffalo has been getting absurd, record-breaking amounts of rain, and the local Seniors suspect the influence of wizardry, maybe a spell gone wrong somewhere, but they haven't been able to find anything. So Kit and Nita are anchoring the southeastern corner of a really, really big analytical spell, meant to hash through all of the weather-affecting magic in the region looking for anything that could be involved. The spell as designed is going to get hopelessly snarled up every time it hits a big city; Nita thinks they should just exclude urban centers by hand and run them as separate search operations, but the Dayton wizard thinks she can modify the sweep edge to slow down when it starts crossing increasing population density. And Traverse City is nervous about executing something that complicated, and wants someone from Buffalo to come out and supervise, and of course the Seniors want to be home for it, and Montreal thinks Potsdam would have been a more logical northeastern corner, and everyone has to talk and talk and talk about all of this because nobody wants to sink their wizardry into something that's going to stall and crash and fall apart, or even run for twice as long as it really has to.

Kit cares in a sort of dutiful way, but honestly he's happy to go along with whatever gets decided: he'd like the people of Buffalo to stop getting flooded, and he trusts Nita to not write them into anything unwise, but this isn't the sort of spell engineering that sparks his imagination, and he doesn't have much to add beyond routine double-checking of the parts Nita is working on.

So the evening after, and the evening after that, get filled up with spellcraft and debate. The second morning after the almost-sex, Kit tells himself he's going to bring it up then, but Nita is going through logistics: they're expecting a package from Montreal, can he go pick it up at the post office, she has an all-hands meeting at the day job and then promised Barbara she would come by again -

"Barbara is the nature people?" Kit interrupts.

"No," Nita says, "Barbara from the farmer's market. With the pear trees."

"Donating pears to the…?" Kit guesses, but Nita is shaking her head and laughing at him fondly. It's not a bad guess; Nita's been volunteering with them for awhile, and feeding kids pears totally sounds like "getting kids into Nature and Nature into kids" - but he's apparently missed something.

"There are no pears, that's the whole problem," Nita says, and, oh, right, this does sound familiar now.

"Three different heirloom trees," Kit says.

"Right, three trees, only she's not sure if they're different varieties or not - they think they're two and one, but none of them have fruited since Barbara bought the place."

"And you've been talking to them about why not."

"They're flowering, it's a good time to discuss it. I asked Barbara to count bees, when I was out there on Tuesday, I'll be curious to see how her impressions match up with theirs."

The same way people in the neighborhood sometimes ask Kit to take a look at their cars, when they're worried they're being ripped off at the mechanics and want a second opinion, Nita has a bit of a reputation for gardening advice, for getting hydrangeas to flower and explaining why someone's vegetables in the community garden aren't growing as well as the ones two plots over. It's nice to have small work as well as big.

***

Kit is just putting dinner on the table that night when Nita gets home. The small sounds of her taking off her shoes and hanging up her bag make him happy - she's home, at their home, and the kitchen smells like sage and squash and he has a nice plate of food to give her. She paces over to him and he turns to her, expecting a peck on the lips, and is surprised by her tongue in his mouth.

Well, okay. He reaches behind her and sets the plate down on the counter, then lets his hands settle at her waist. Nita has her hands in his hair, holding his head; she's sucking on his lower lip and hooking one ankle behind his calf.

Kit strokes his hands down the whole length of her back, from her shoulders, along the curve of her spine, and down over the fullness of her bottom. It's as much soothing as anything, hey, easy there, I've got you, but Nita pushes her pelvis against his like he had grabbed and lifted.

"Hey," she says, pulling her face back so she can look him in the eyes, "I stopped by the drugstore on the way home."

Kit draws a blank for a moment, and then - "Oh," he gets it, "You want to - "

"Yep," she grins, "Come on," and she grabs him by the hand and starts dragging him to their bedroom.

But, dinner? he thinks, but the oven is off, and the squash will reheat nicely, so, why not. Nita unbuttons her shirt and then his and then drops to her knees to go after his pants, rubbing her cheek against his dick through his underwear.

Back when they had decided their partnership was _like that_ after all, they had wanted to try everything, but they'd given up on going down on each other early on, well before they were done with the rest of it. Neither of them had liked the asynchronicity of it, the division into giver and recipient, and sixty-nining was just awkward and ridiculous. They tried it in microgravity, but there were so many more fun things to play with in microgravity than each other's bodies; they gave up on sixty-nining and tried telepathic feedback, but the outward focus that kept up the mental connection turned out to be at odds with the inward focus of orgasm. "You know," Nita has said, "This isn't a skill we have to master," and so they hadn't.

Now Nita licks up and down a few times and sucks briefly, just enough to perk Kit's dick's interest, and then pulls him down onto the bed with her. They're lying on their sides, looking at each other, and Nita has gotten naked at some point. She kisses him. He kisses her. Her free hand plays with his ear, his shoulderblade. His free arm is wrapped around her, holding her close so they're chest to chest and belly to belly, so warm. Her leg is hooked over his hip, and she's angling around - 

"Hey," Kit points out, "You bought something, but if we're not using it - "

"Yeep," Nita says, rolling away and down to the floor, where she rummages around for a moment. "Aha!" She pops back up holding the little foil package.

It's been a long time, but the gloved feeling of the condom is about the same as it ever was, and the feeling of sliding in. Kit loses himself in watching Nita's face as she moves on top of him, the way she smiles, like she's just seen something cool, the way she closes her eyes, like she's trying to remember something, the way she frowns, like she's concentrating. And then she's looking right at him.

"Kit," she says, "Are you close?"

"Um. Not really. I could be?"

Nita sighs. "Do you want to be? Can I... do anything?"

Kit frowns. "Should I do something for you? This is your show, here."

Nita pushes her hair back from his face and flops off of him, lying next to him on the bed, shoulder to shoulder. "Ugh, if you didn't want to, you should have said something, Kit!"

"No!" he says quickly. "I don't _not_ want to. I would be happy to continue." He makes a little "be my guest" gesture at his dick, still up but listing slightly. "I just don't know what's going on here."

"Not sex, apparently," Nita says, but she laces her fingers with his to take the tartness out of it, and tilts her head over towards his. They've watched clouds and stars like this on a hundred worlds, although right now they're just looking at their ceiling.

Kit looks at Nita out of the corner of his eye. "Eleven years, and then twice in one week - it just seems like there's something to be curious about there. Did you talk to Dairine again?"

Nita had once had an infamous conversation with Dairine in which she had said "I just don't see why you would ever have sex if you can say your partner's name in the Speech" and Dairine had said "you need to see either a doctor or a couples therapist" and Nita had come home and cried and asked Kit if he wanted to break up.

Kit had been completely and entirely on Nita's side - he loved to hear Nita say his name, to say hers, to write hers into his spells, to hand her his power, to take hers and do something beautiful with it. In the Art, he was completely known and completely trusted; what was a couples therapist going to add to that? He had scrambled for the right words for Nita, pointed out that Dairine had liked jiujitsu, too, so what did she know about what worked for Nita, and no way was he going to break up with her just because Dairine couldn't see how perfectly they fit together. And then they'd gone to Enceladus, as he recalled, and watched Saturn rise in the geyser-mist.

"I haven't talked to Dairine in weeks," Nita says, "And I never talk to her at all any more about things that are none of her business."

Good, Kit thinks, but that's beside the point. "I thought we were both happy with how things were," he says, squeezing her hand, "So I want to know, if you're not."

"I was happy," Nita protests, "I mean, I am! I just - wanted to. I don't know. Back when we were trying it out, I used to think about it all the time, I was just so curious what it would feel like, and it was this whole other way to know you."

Kit twists, and kisses her shoulder, and Nita presses her toes to the top of his foot.

"This wasn't like that, it wasn't even in words, it was like, my thighs just wanted your hips."

Kit pushes himself up on one elbow to look down at her. "What? Nita, you always think in words."

Nita's eyes are glancing from side to side, like something isn't adding up for her either.

"Well... maybe it was..."

"No, that's exactly what you said. Neets, this might sound crazy, but could there be some sort of influence here? Like a broken spell somewhere. It's completely fine if there isn't, sign me up for anything you want me for, but would it be worth checking?"

Nita bites her lip. "Yeah," she says uncertainly, "Yeah, check."

After weeks of working on the Buffalo diagnostic, it's a piece of cake to throw together a spell-finding spell to run on Nita. Kit double-checks that it's read-only and isn't going to affect anything, and then kicks it off.

The spell projects a floating image of her body into the air above the bed. They watch the green tendril of foreign magic uncurl from her airway and wind its way down into her hormones and limbic system. It's pretty clearly purposeful and not a side-effect of something gone wrong.

Kit had formed the suspicion, but he wasn't really prepared for them to find anything. "What," he says. "Who. Who would - Dairine wouldn't - "

But Nita has pulled the thread out, and is reading it, and is laughing.

"Kit," she says, "Kit, it's the _pears_. You know, I've been talking it up to them, how they might want to fruit, how it could be fulfilling, and joyous, about being open to pollination, about the value of heirloom varieties - this is practically word for word." Her whole body shakes when she laughs; Kit gives in to temptation and face-plants into her chest, letting her laugh shake him too. She combs through his hair with one hand and keeps reading through the spell with the other.

"They must have thought they were returning the favor. I'll have to stop by and talk to them about it. It's Speech carried by pollen; they did seem pretty savvy for fruit trees but I had no idea they were up to anything this complicated."

Kit sighs into Nita. "Pear trees. So, wait, would this be sapient p-"

"Don't even."

"Okay. More seriously, is the spell still operative, now that you know about it? And do you want to do anything about it?"

"Do you mean, like, disengage it, or do you mean take advantage of it?"

Kit shrugs. " _I_ haven't been breathing the spell pollen. I guess I could, if you want to roll with it."

He feels Nita shake her head. "I want to go talk to them. Maybe apologize if I was pushing too much. We can all reel back in our Speech together."

"So... dinner?"

***

But the next day, when Nita comes home, she isn't laughing.

"Kit," she says, "I need to talk to you." Normally he would smile to himself a little - this is a generally true sentence, that Nita needs to talk to him, he could say it comfortably in the Speech. But here, now, in the specific, she's obviously worried and upset, and so Kit puts down the carburetor he's been fiddling with and gives her his full attention.

"I talked to the pear trees," she says, "And they were really concerned about me. They thought my, my heritage, my preservation, was much more at risk than theirs was. That even if they never fruited again someone could always take cuttings, but if I didn't fruit soon, I would miss my chance. So I talked to my ovaries - "

"Wait," says Kit, "You talked to your ovaries?"

"Sure," Nita says, "Why not, you were talking to a carburetor."

"But I'm not the car," Kit says. "How can _you_ talk to a part of you. Can you talk to your brain?"

Nita frowns. "I never tried, but that does sound weird. But, I don't know, you couldn't take my brain out and still have me, and that's obviously not the case for ovaries. Anyways. I talked to them, and - well, they say I only have a few good eggs left."

Kit isn't entirely sure what to make of that, but it sounds like the sort of thing where you take your partner's hand, so he does that.

"Aren't you young for that?" he asks carefully. "I don't know about your mom, but my mom didn't get, like, hot flashes until I was a teenager."

"Maybe when I was spending a year of my life per shot, it took my fertile years," Nita snaps. "I don't know, I'm thirty, I have basically no ovarian reserves, I'm ovulating tomorrow, I have maybe a couple more cycles before goodbye to any chance of conceiving my own biological child, and fucking _pears_ think I should get pregnant _right now_ , and I'm not even sure they're wrong."

Kit's grip tightens on Nita, and he realizes that his hands were greasy, and now hers are too.

"Um," he says. "Wow."

Nita thunks her forehead into his collarbone, which hurts, but he tries to stay sturdy and comforting. "I know," she moans, "This is huge, we have to think about this, we have to _talk_ about this, there's so much we would have to consider - "

"Nah," Kit says, and he realizes he's grinning fiercely. "We are all about massive, world-shaking decisions made on the spur of the moment. I mean, sure, let's have dinner, and talk about some pros and cons. But I'm in," he says, "I say we go for it." He feels the full-body tingle of a spell enacting, the listening hush of the world after he took his Oath. Nita stares at him, incredulous, but unable to not smile back.

"What if it's a wizard," she starts, "What if it _isn't_ a wizard, what if my power is all tied up and something happens, would we need to get married - do you want to get married?!"

"I want to have dinner," Kit says, steering her to the bathroom. "We're going to wash our hands, we're going to eat a food, I'm happy to get married if you want but we should probably invite our families..."

***

That night, they're naked and in bed again.

"Is this even more awkward than usual?" Nita asks. Kit, who is kissing her neck, mumbles something, but Nita won't be dismissed so easily. "No, seriously," she says, "This doesn't feel weird to you?"

"It feels great," he says, "You feel great."

"It feels weird to me," Nita says, and Kit gives up on her neck and says, "Okay, yes, it is awkward, but speaking as the half of the equation that has to, uh, accomplish something here, I'm trying to roll with it."

"It's not too late to loop you into the pear tree spell."

"Is it still working for you?"

"Maybe?"

Nita had considered ending the spell, but as she had told Kit, it had been meant as a gift, and she hated to waste it. Kit, however, was reluctant to let meddling fruit trees influence him, even if it might have been fun to feel high and hot and keen to pollinate Nita.

He kisses the tip of her nose, her cheek, her ear, trying to remember how this had worked when they were teenagers. There had been a couple of years when they had fooled around every chance they got, he must have felt fluent in this at some point.

Of course, they'd been very busy with school and Errantry, so there hadn't been so very many chances, really. And there had been a lot of interruptions from parents and siblings and aliens. And for a long time it had been all clothes-on and hands above the waist, until Kit had managed to have the conversation with Nita where she admitted she was nervous too but wanted to see what it felt like to do more.

Right now Kit feels more impatient than nervous, eager to embark on this new adventure. Unfortunately that's not the kind of excitement that appeals to his dick, so he's trying to push all of that aside and just focus on mechanics. Nita's hands feel good on his back. Her body is gloriously warm underneath him. His thigh is slippery where she's grinding against it - something is clearly working for her, whether it's the pear spell or just the actions of their bodies.

He makes some space between them so he can reach her with his hand, and slips a finger inside of her. God, she's wet. We're going in there, he tells his dick silently, thinking of Nita talking to her ovaries. It's not Speech, just internal monologue, but his dick twitches in response.

"Mmm," Nita says, and gets both hands on him, stroking and fondling.

His dick has definitely gotten with the program. "Let's do this?"

"It might not even work," Nita says, and Kit gets his weight on his elbows above her.

"I think it will," he says. Or they can try again, but he doesn't think they'll need to.

"Are you sure?" Nita asks again. "Are you really sure?"

" _Yes_ ," he says, and then her name in the Speech, the beautiful, beloved syllables. " _I want to make a baby from the love we feel for each other and also our combined genetic material._ " It's corny and awkward and nothing he would ever say in English or Spanish, but in the Speech it's just a statement of fact.

"Okay," Nita says, "Okay, okay, I want you inside me," and she says his name back to him, and then they are committing, then they are doing something ridiculous and close, then they are opening the door to something entirely new.

**Author's Note:**

> Regarding sex pollen/consent: after years of happily not having sex, Nita initiates sex twice while not knowing she's under the influence of libido-increasing magic. No one is distressed by this.
> 
> Regarding labels: I'm not sure if Kit and Nita here are more like grey-asexual or libidoless romantics or what. Please feel free to tell me ::grin::. (I'm happy to get criticism/negative feedback, by the way; I feel like it's still an honor that someone took the time to comment ::grin::.)


End file.
